I love the moment when bread first comes out of the oven. The kitchen is hot and filled with the smell of it and, for just a little while, the loaf makes a tiny crackling sound, as if it is resting, at last, after a day and a night of effort.
I made this loaf last week, from an old Jeffrey Steingarten recipe. I was saying goodbye to a friend, someone I doubt I’ll see again. I wanted to make her something delicious, to end things on a tasty note.
I hope she enjoyed it.
Disenchanted Lib Dem voters will be pleased to read today that, after getting thoroughly fucked on, well, everything they thought their party stood for, Cleggy has finally persuaded the Tories to do something good and righteous in the name of civil liberties.
Although their pleasure is likely to evaporate once they realise that an “unmistakable re-balancing of public policy in favour of liberty” (to quote Lord Macdonald, the Lib Dem peer appointed to review the conclusions of the counter-terrorism review) is actually code for “we’re only going to lock people up without charge for 14 days, rather than 28.”
Happy Fucking Days.
I found this article back in July last year, while reading the Stranger in a Seattle coffee shop. I cut it out but then promptly forgot about it until last week when I found the clipping in a (clearly underused) pocket of my bag. Anyway, it is old but still awesome. And sort of relevant again, given the recent DADT showdown. The full article is here. and some of the best lines are below…
I get it: There are some hot Republicans out there. I’ve undressed a few of ‘em with my own eyes. I’ve been to the Republican National Convention. Twice.
And, yes, there’s nothing like a good hate/pity/mercy fuck now and then. But self-respecting queers should not be fucking card-carrying Republicans.
Oh, you can attempt to rationalize a same-sex encounter with a card-carrying member of the GOP any which way you want—”Someone has to fuck some sense into Aaron Schock…” —but unless you’re taking one for the team, there’s simply no excuse. (Taking one for the team = sticking it in/to a high-profile, anti-gay GOP closet case you intend to out.)
[...]
Here’s how to really fuck the GOP: Keep coming out.
[...]
So get out there and be honest about who you are, where you are, and who you love. Because when you do that—”Hey, Grandma, there’s something I need to tell you…”—you leave the extreme right with fewer and fewer suckers willing to buy the hate-spiked snake oil they’re selling.
You wanna fuck the Republicans? Come out and keep coming out.
But don’t fuck Republicans. They can go fuck themselves.
If you don’t already, you should listen to Savage’s podcast. Brilliant and (often) hilarious.
Kate Sheppard has a great satire in Mother Jones today of Republican arguments about the new START treaty being “rushed” and, in particular, of Mitch McConnell’s absurd statement on CNN that: “I think if they’d taken more time, I know the members of the Foreign Relations Committee spent a lot of time on this but the rest of us haven’t, and so all of the sudden we’re once again trying to rush things right here before Christmas Eve.”
This is the best bit:
Awesome.
I’m now blogging on online security and human rights here: http://securityandrights.org/ I’m working on the issue at the moment and starting a blog seemed like a novel way of keeping material organised and staying abreast of the news. I am hoping it will turn out to be better, in any case, than my usual method, which involves hundreds of poorly organised pdfs…
A cracking good piece by Joshua Green in The Atlantic today about John McCain’s long journey from principled centrist to right wing troglodyte.
I guess I find his current positions on things like DADT so disturbing because, like Green, I once admired him for standing up (a little) to the properly crazy Republicans on things like global warming and campaign finance reform. What the fuck happened John?
The CIA has found some tapes of Ramzi ‘I’ve been locked up for a decade without trial’ Binalshibh being interrogated in one of their secret overseas prisons. The government twice told federal judges that the tapes didn’t exist but it turns out they were just ‘under a desk.’
There is a point where giving almost a million people top secret security clearance, producing 50,000 intelligence ‘reports’ a year, hiring more private contractors than you can count, and forgetting that you stashed black site interrogation videos under a desk stops sounding like ‘intelligence’ and starts sounding like ‘extreme incompetence.’
I’m thinking Bin Laden need not get too worried. Unless, of course, they get Paul The Octopus on the case.
I’m having trouble embedding this video from Fox News. Anyway, it is worth following the link to watch. Favourite quotes: “If [college] degrees are making people more likely to support same sex-marriage … how do we fix this?” and, from Tucker Carson, “well, it is possible to make a case for college.”
And, of course, the hilarious bit at the end where they talk about the study’s methodology and state that “it is sorta hard to see how the methodology could be flawed.” Um, yeah. Just like it is hard to see how causality and correlation are different ‘cos they’re both big words beginning with the letter c.
Governor Schwarzenegger this week suggested that California could solve is problem of overcrowded prisons by sending “20,000 illegal immigrants” for internment in Mexico. “Think about it”, he exclaimed to the Sacramento press club, “ if California gives Mexico the money…”
Or was that second bit Lord Bathurst? I forget.
From Badger5000 on Twitter. Not sure I entirely agree. But he has a point. Same reason I’m nostalgic for the Keating years in Australia.
The Guardian newspaper reported this weekend that British police are planning on deploying a number of unmanned drones similar to those currently in use over Afghanistan and Iraq.
Presumably the use of high-tech military hardware in pursuit of such laudable goals as: “prevention of theft from cash machines, preventing theft of tractors and monitoring antisocial driving” is all part of the government’s community policing strategy. Although, having cast my eye over the “five critical elements” of that strategy on the Home Office website, I can suggest a few minor changes to its wording.
If you find any of this at all concerning, there is no need to worry. As the Guardian reveals, Kent police plan (in an untypically cunning bait and switch) to introduce the scheme first as a means of detecting migrants attempting to cross the English Channel — what they term “a good news story.” Then, while everyone is appeased by the thought that only poor black foreigners are being spied on, they can launch them across the country.
And then those tractor thieves had better watch out.
I’m a big fan of Michael Ruhlman’s new book Ratio and its associated iPhone app. Instead of recipes, as such, it gives ratios for sauces, doughs, batters, custards, stocks, and so forth. Hollandaise, for example, is given as: five parts butter, one part egg yolks, and one part liquid (a reduction of vinegar and aromatics).
Now, while I would usually count hollandaise as an essential part of every well-rounded breakfast, this morning I used Ratio only for its pancake-making tips (four parts flour, 2 parts milk, 2 parts eggs, 1 part butter). It worked out well, although I recommend adding one part Kermode and Mayo to make them properly good.
I often make pizzas when I’m tired and don’t have the energy to cook something complicated. I tend to just make a simple dough then let it prove a bit on top of the oven while I’m searching the fridge for things that might work as toppings. Or opening a beer.
This evening I spread a little pesto on the dough, then added some roast pumpkin and pinenuts. Then, once it was baked, I added some goat’s cheese and a little baby spinach to give it some colour.
It is snowing outside but, for a moment, in my kitchen, I forgot I was back in Switzerland.
Republican Senator for Alaska, Lisa Murkowski, is putting forward a proposal for a vote this week that would, if successful, prevent the Federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from regulating greenhouse gas emissions.
Despite the fact that Murkowski’s proposals were written with the help of energy industry lobbyists and have been widely condemned by environmental groups, her spokesman, Robert Dillon, still claims that Murkowski “supports doing something to address climate change and greenhouse gas emissions.”
Just what that something is has, until now, remained a mystery. However, highly placed GOP sources this morning leaked me a pre-release version of the Senator’s climate strategy, a copy of which is reproduced below.
The same source, on condition of anonymity, claimed, however, that “something” could yet be replaced with “nothing” or even “all you scientists suck my balls” (the preferred language of industry lobbyists) before the strategy’s release sometime this Spring.
There are many and varied explanations for the continuing Israel-Palestine conflict. A story on France 24 this morning reveals, however, that the major barrier to peace is actually stunningly simple: Israel is run by school children.
As the story reveals, The Israeli Transport Ministry has decided to no longer display road signs in languages other than Hebrew (currently they are in English, Hebrew and Arabic). The reason? According to Transport Minister Yisrael Katz its because Palestinian maps don’t always use Israeli names for towns within Israel.
Setting aside the fact that countries all over the world do this all the time — according to the French, the Chinese capital is “Pékin” — Katz’s sheer pettiness is extraordinary. Are we now set to hear him explain the wall’s diversion from the ’67 border as one giant game of “don’t step on the cracks”? Or the latest “targeted assassination” as involving stolen lunch money?
Get this guy out of office and give his job to a grownup.
